


Treading New Ground in Fresh Snow

by elleavantemm



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: First Time, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-13
Updated: 2012-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-29 10:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/318989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elleavantemm/pseuds/elleavantemm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Revisiting the fandom favourite of the boys finding each other at a boarding school. Their first experience of snow fall on earth provides a quiet moment of emotional connection that prompts Duo to inquire about friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Treading New Ground in Fresh Snow

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the prompt "fresh snow" for the winter round of the livejournal Advent Challenge.

It was their fifth school in as many months, jumping from place to place, mission to mission faster than they could feed and delete their information from the school computers. The only benefit to their brief stays was the limited amount of time for outsiders to learn anything about them, avoiding a trail of information. It was late in the year, winter settling in the air, leaves falling off trees as though the frozen ground were a relaxing get-away resort; see you again in the spring, they call adrift in free-fall. Their latest mission had them in Western Europe, a city just outside of Dusseldorf, Germany. Neither boy spoke a word of German, but thankfully they wouldn’t be staying too long, and the staff as well as most of the students spoke fairly good English.

The first time that it snowed, the other students looked at Heero and Duo like they were crazy when they rushed outside as soon as class let out, falling down in the fresh snow, soaking their school uniforms without care. Earth-born kids just didn’t understand. The colonies didn’t experience the luxury of natural weather patterns, temperatures carefully controlled to mimic that of the earth, but without the benefits of rain, or snow. They could hear the other students in the doorway, talking quickly in a mix of German and English, calling them crazy, asking what was wrong with the two of them.

Heero spread his arms out wide over the cold grass. The flakes were large, but light as air as they settled into his open palms, immediately melting away. If he died during the war, he was glad that he would at least have this memory to take with him. Duo had his head tipped back, tongue out to collect flakes, laughing as they landed cold and then disappeared. The snowflakes left an odd salty flavour on his tongue; it surprised Duo, not sure what to expect snow to taste like beyond cold and wet.

The two boys lay out on the grass, catching cold, until their bodies began to gather small mounds of snow on their limbs. Duo stretched his arms farther and his fingertips brushed along Heero’s. The other boy shivered, and Duo felt it through the tremors of his fingers. “Heero?” he whispered into the quiet.

“Hm?” Heero responded. He flexed his fingers around the tips of Duo’s own.

“Maybe we should go inside.”

“Hm,” he replied, and it wasn’t an answer.

Duo moved to sit up, but Heero tightened his fingers, held him back. “Just another minute, okay?”  
Duo nodded, and found himself wondering about who this other pilot really was, with his stoicism and bravado and sudden bouts of carefree childishness. After a moment, Heero sat up, pulling his hand away, and for some reason that left Duo feeling colder than the wet shirt against his back.

They shivered as they stepped into the warm dormitory, heat drawing the chill from their bodies. Their shoulders bumped together as they climbed the stairs to their room. Duo’s braid, heavy with moisture, swung back and forth, smacking against Heero’s hand wetly, until he wrapped his fingers around it, and held it until they stood in front of their dorm room door.

The release of Duo’s braid, much like the release of his fingers earlier, left him feeling as though something was missing. He stared at Heero’s back as he moved about their room, removing his wet clothes and slipping into warm, dry pajamas. “Don’t just stand in the door,” Heero said, furrowing his brow at Duo. “Get out of your wet clothes before you get sick.”

Duo moved on autopilot, pushing the small buttons through the holes with fumbling fingers, slipping pants wet with damp down his numb thighs. He went into their tiny bathroom and rubbed a warm washcloth over his chilled skin before pulling his own pajamas on and sliding beneath the covers. There was homework to do, of course. Assignments due the next day that needed attending to; but Duo didn’t particularly care. Heero, on the other hand, sat in his own narrow bed just a few feet away, text book propped between his knees, pencil and notebook in hand.

Duo rolled over in bed, watching his roommate as he carefully read each page of text, writing in his neat, block-like script. This was another side of the other pilot that Duo often found himself wondering about. Heero the student was so different than Heero the pilot, Heero the soldier, Heero the teenager. Duo wondered what Heero would be like if he hadn’t been trained to kill from a young age, if they might be friends if they met under normal circumstances, such as the ones that they were pretending to participate in; as classmates, as roommates.

“Heero?”

“Hm?” the other boy replied, looking up briefly from his notes before continuing his neat scrawl.

Duo chewed his lip for a moment. “Do you think, if we met under different circumstances, that we would be friends?” The question seemed to imply that they were friends at that moment in time, although Duo wasn’t entirely sure if that were true.

The question caught Heero off-guard and he put his pencil down, looking at Duo contemplatively. “I don’t know. Different circumstances also means that we would be very different people.”

It was the same answer that Duo had come to on his own. “Are we friends?” he asked curiously. He wanted the answer to be yes. Even though Duo had shot Heero upon their first meeting, their second meeting had involved a daring rescue; perhaps there was some redeeming value in that?

It was a long time before Heero replied, and Duo felt like an idiot for even asking. “I... trust you,” he admitted several long minutes later. “And I respect your abilities as a pilot. Does that make us friends?”  
Did it? What really defined what a friend was? They didn’t talk about anything beyond their Gundams, OZ, and the mission. What else was there to talk about? Duo was positive that if he asked Heero what his favourite food was, his favourite colour, his favourite anything, that the answer would be disappointing because it would likely be pre-fabricated, or non-existent.

“What do you dream about?” he said before he was aware that the words had even formulated in his brain.

“Space,” Heero replied automatically. “The freedom of being among the stars. The vast emptiness of it all.”

Duo dreamt about space, as well, for many of the same reasons. Duo dreamt about other things, horrific things, but he made a point of keeping those personal memories tightly under wraps. “What do you dream about?” Heero returned. He closed the textbook between he knees and rolled over onto his side to face Duo.

Duo opened his mouth to answer and then paused before the flood gates of honesty opened. Heero waited expectantly, pillow folded under his head. “I dream about space, too,” Duo replied lamely. He could see the flicker of confusion on Heero’s face at his hesitation, how obvious it was that Duo had intended to say something different. Thankfully, Heero didn’t push, and Duo rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling.

“I dream about things before Operation Meteor, too,” he added quietly. If he was going to be this honest, he wouldn’t be able to look Heero in the eye. “I don’t know if you remember your life before Doctor J, but there are things that still haunt me.”

Heavy silence settled between them. Duo could hear Heero’s steady breathing, could feel the weight of his stare. The sound of Heero’s voice, low and rough, surprised Duo. “Do you ever find yourself waking up screaming and not knowing why? Or as though your hands are slick with blood, and you aren’t sure if it’s yours or someone elses?”

Duo swallowed thickly. He could feel the hot sting of tears behind his eyes. He knew exactly what Heero was talking about, understood the fear and the not knowing. “Yes,” Duo breathed, wiping at his eyes. The bed dipped as Heero slipped in next to him, strong arm slipping around Duo’s waist. Soft hair brushed Duo’s chin.

Had they tipped over into friendship somewhere between falling snow and moments of honesty? Duo turned his head, staring into Heero’s wide blue eyes. Without thinking, he leaned in and pressed a dry kiss to Heero’s mouth. The angle was all wrong, awkward and uncomfortable; but Heero held tight to Duo’s side, pulling him on to his side to fit their mouths together properly. His kiss was full of desperation, less about romantic emotion, and more about a urgent need to connect emotionally with another person.

Fingers wrapped around the width of Duo’s braid, stroking down the still-wet strands in a lurid suggestion of Heero’s intention. Duo gasped against the other boy’s mouth, moving closer to him in the narrow bed. He wasn’t sure where he wanted this to go - if he wanted it to go anywhere at all - but for the moment he would follow Heero’s lead.

Outside the window, snow continued to fall. Come morning, there would be a blanket of fresh, perfectly undisturbed snow, covering the places where they had lost themselves the night before; new ground to tread - this time, together.


End file.
